Our paper on age- and sex-dependent microbial diversity is out! Titled Age- and Sex-Dependent Patterns of Gut Microbial Diversity in Human Adults, this work was a collaborative effort between the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, and San Diego State University.

Published today in mSystems, we show that the bacterial diversity of the human gut microbiome is strongly influenced by the age and sex of an individual. Specifically, younger age is positively associated with gut bacterial diversity in both men and women, but young women display greater biodiversity than young men. Gut samples from 9,000 adults aged 20 to 69 from geographically diverse regions were analyzed for this project.

This publication is a great outcome for all involved, especially first-author Jacobo de la Cuesta-Zuluaga, and furthers our understanding of population-specific diesease signatures of the human microbiome. You can read more about it here in the UC San Diego Health press release.

de la Cuesta-Zuluaga, J., Kelley, S.T., Chen, Y., Escobar, J.S., Mueller, N.T., Ley, R.E., McDonald, D., Huang, S., Swafford, A.D., Knight, R., Thackray, V.G. (2019) Age- and sex-dependent patterns of gut microbial diversity in human adults. mSystems 4(4):e00261-19.